One of the main complaints aimed at Nagios was the slow speed of development. The following graphs, taken from the open source directory ohloh, show the number of commiters and the number of commits over the last three years for Nagios, OpenNMS and Wireshark. I can’t vouch for how accurate the stats are but I think they do provide some insight into the development processes of the respective projects.

Contributors comparison between Nagios, OpenNMS & Wireshark

Commits comparison between Nagios, OpenNMS & Wireshark

I’ve used OpenNMS, Wireshark and Nagios as the basis for the comparison because all three are mature, successful open source network management projects of similar age. Wireshark and OpenNMS dwarf Nagios both in the number of contributors and the number of commits. Commits themselves can be misleading, a commit into the source repository doesn’t indicate what the commit contained, whether it was a simple bug fix to a single file or a very large new feature requiring hundreds of changes. There is no reason to think that Nagios commits are inherently larger than Wireshark or OpenNMS commits.

Looking at the graphs, perhaps there was a problem with the structure of the Nagios project.

Author: Jack Hughes

An experienced software engineer with 20+ years experience writing products for Microsoft Windows based operating systems as well as 12+ years experience hosting websites on Linux and Windows including e-commerce and CMS systems.
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@Tarus, nice to see you back. Quite agree… if you want a vibrant open source project it is kinda hard to see how you can do that without heavy community involvement in all roles. If you’re focused on an open core strategy with a proprietary offering then you still need a community but it is likely to be a different animal from a traditional open source community like the ones surrounding OpenNMS and Wireshark for instance.